Today, television provides means to mold opinions and as such acts as one of the major vehicles for marketing and advertising. Television programs are delivered to people mainly through broadcasting model.
Touch screen devices are increasingly popular devices which among other things are used to enjoy audiovisual content like videos and similar multimedia or get information about products and services, e.g. from the Internet. Touch screen devices can also act as so-called second screen devices for television, meaning that people can actively seek information about a movie or its actors while watching the movie from the primary screen. Such information can also be brought to their attention and even synced with the television program or other video that the users are watching.
A commercial advertisement on television is a special span of “television programming” produced and paid for by an organization, which conveys a message, typically to market a product or service. Marketing revenue provides a significant portion of the funding for most privately owned television networks.
The challenge of today is how to serve the consumer with information that is customized or personalized, relevant, timely and in some instances immediately actionable and in a manner that is non-disturbing. The problems relate to various parties including but not limited to consumers/viewers, marketers, TV broadcasters, networks etc.
Television advertising and marketing in the U.S. and in other countries involves two main tasks: creating a television advertisement or marketing information and placing the advertisement or marketing information on television via a targeted air time media buy that reaches the desired customer.
The vast majority of television marketing information today consists of brief advertising or marketing spots, ranging in length from a few seconds to several minutes or to even program-length infomercials. Advertisements or marketing information of this sort have been used to promote a wide variety of goods, services and ideas since the dawn of television. Because a single television advertisement can be broadcast repeatedly over the course of weeks, months, and even years television advertisement production studios often spend enormous sums of money in the production of one single thirty-second television spot.
The viewership of television programming, as measured by media measurement is often used as a metric for television advertisement or marketing information placement, and consequently, for the rates charged to advertisers to air within a given network, television program, or time of day.
For each hour in a television broadcast day, advertisements or marketing information take up a fairly consistent proportion of the time. As an example a typical 30 minute block of time can include 22 minutes of programming and eight minutes of advertisements/marketing information—six minutes for national advertising or marketing and two minutes for local advertising or marketing. TV commercials are fairly ubiquitous and not only broadcasted in between of the television shows. TV commercials are displayed in the middle, in between or simultaneously with TV programming.
Commercials might be regarded as annoying or disturbing for many reasons. They often unnecessarily stop the flow of TV program; either at climaxes of the plot or at a major turning point in the show, which many people find exciting or entertaining to watch. In that instance the commercials are simply nuisance and deteriorate the entertainment or information value of the programming negatively. People have been annoyed because the volume of the commercials tends to be louder than the main programming.
The core reason people find advertisements/marketing information annoying is that the advertisement/marketing information offer is not of interest at that moment or at all, or the presentation is unclear. A typical viewer has seen enough advertisements/marketing information to anticipate that most advertisements will be bothersome, prompting the viewer to be mercilessly selective in their viewing. Conversely, if advertisement/marketing information strikes a chord with the viewer, or has entertainment value beyond the basic message, then viewers tend to stay with the advertisement/marketing information, perhaps even looking forward to viewing it again. Relevant ads are better than non-relevant ones.
In a nutshell all of the above nuisance factors are annoying and disturbing from the viewer's perspective but are not good from marketer's point of view either.
Different recording or “time-shifting” devices have gained popularity among the viewers perhaps also due to some of the above mentioned reasons—commercials regarded as disturbing or annoying—and viewers then watch the programming at a time suitable for them and skip all the advertisements/marketing information or they are left watching old advertisements which are not timely and therefore non-relevant. An advertisement can be non-relevant if it is non-actionable due to the time lapse like a Christmas advertisement proposing a consumer to do something before Christmas but if the advertisement is received after Christmas it is of no use. This is obviously not good for marketers.
Television is by nature a mass media through which information can be served to the public. One additional problem with TV as a channel for advertisement is that it is by nature a push media that cannot be customized for any subset of viewers although different viewers or groups would have slightly different needs and preferences. These needs and preferences should be more satisfactorily addressed by the marketer. That is also one reason why the number of viewers within the target demographic is generally regarded as more important to ad revenues than total viewers. Targeted reach is generally better than “just” reach.
As television is traditionally a passive media the viewers are often left without any means to immediately or at all act upon in accordance with how the marketing communication/commercials propose or the marketers would like them to do.
On the other hand a marketer cannot even be whether the information that they want to deliver to the consumer is actually seen by the consumer at all or whether it is seen by the optimal or during a certain period of or specific time.
The above mentioned problems are not separate from each other but can appear in any number of permutations and form a complex and interdependent set of problems that should be solved.
In a nutshell consumers are left out from some of the most interesting and acute advertisements and at the same time marketers are unable to reach the potentially interested users effectively. There is clearly a need for a new architecture and solution to manage the challenges that consumers are facing today when being provided advertisements or marketing information together with some multimedia broadcast or transmission. Furthermore, improved methods for synchronization for available advertisements or marketing information are needed.